A good use for a bad bandsaw
So I borrowed a junky little Ryobi bandsaw from work to mess around with. I was going to try to use it to cut some curved pieces for a japanese table I’m going to get around to building sometime. I was using 8/4 stock for the curves.
ha ha ha. Yeah, I know. What was I thinking. The sawblade was wandering around the lumber like a drunken fratboy on mardi gras. The results weren’t pretty. I left it at that, and continued in my resolve to go buy a decent bandsaw sometime (mostly for resawing, but also for the odd curved piece).
Well, as you may remember, I’ve been having some troubles with spline trimming lately. And recently it occurred to me… a bandsaw would be a pretty decent way to trim a spline, no? Sure enough, I ran the only-slightly-bloodied edge of that old picture frame along the junky bandsaw blade, and it was a match made in heaven. The darn thing sheared off perfectly.
Highly recommended approach. By the way, my friend who was putting splines in his cigar box said that the whole flush-cut saw thing works OK, but be very careful to start cutting at the *loose hanging* end. If you don’t, then you risk breaking off the tip of the corner of the spline as you finish the second cut. That’s OK, his humidor will look great with the corners rounded over. But keep it in mind–you’ll thank me for it.
(for those of you keeping track, yeah, I mentioned it in my post of a few days ago, not actually realizing that I *did* have a functional-albeit-crappy bandsaw in my basement at the time. Oh well, I learned.)
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